The Rewards of Patience
[Often considered the poetic successor of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, Auden is also highly regarded for his literary criticism. As a member of a generation of British writers strongly influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, Auden considered social and psychological commentary important functions of literary criticism. As a committed Christian, he viewed art in the context of moral and theological absolutes. While he has been criticized for significant inconsistencies in his thought throughout his career, Auden is generally regarded as a fair and perceptive critic. In the following review, he praises Bogan's Poems and New Poems as a work of "permanent value" inspired by her personal experiences and not written for public taste.]
"Genius has only an immanent teleology, it develops itself, and while developing itself this self-development projects itself as its work. Genius is therefor in no sense inactive, and works within itself perhaps harder than ten business men, but none of its achievements have any exterior telos. This is at once the humanity and the pride of genius; the humanity lies in the fact that it does not define itself teleologically in relation to other men, as though there were any one who needed it; its pride lies in the fact that it immanently relates itself to itself. It is modest of the nightingale not to require anyone to listen to it; but it is also proud of the nightingale not to care whether anyone listens to it or not…. The honored public, the domineering masses, wish genius to express that it exists for their sake; they only see one side of the dialectic of genius, take offence at its pride, and do not see that the same thing is also modesty and humility."
So wrote Kierkegaard in 1847; he did not foresee that by 1942 the masses would have acquired such buying power that genius itself would, in many cases, be thinking of its self-development as a process of learning how to sell itself competitively to the public, that the poet whose true song, unlike that of the nightingale, continually changes because he himself changes, would be tempted to dissociate his song from his nature altogether, until the changes in the latter come to be conditioned, not by changes in himself, but by the shifting of public taste—that he would become, in other words, a journalist.
A public is a disintegrated community. A community is a society of rational beings united by a common tie in virtue of the things that they all love; a public is a crowd of lost beings united only negatively in virtue of the things that they severally fear, among which one of the greatest is the fear of being responsible as a rational being for one's individual self-development. Hence, wherever there is a public, there arises the paradox of a tremendous demand for art in the abstract, but an almost complete repudiation of art in the concrete. A demand because works of art can indeed help people along the road of self-development, and the public feels more helpless than ever; a repudiation because art can only help those who help themselves. It can suggest directions in which people may look if they will; it cannot give them eyes or wills, but it is just these eyes and wills that the public demand, and hope to buy with money and applause.
Subjectively, the situation of the poet is no less difficult. In ages when there was such a thing as a community, the self-development of which his works are the manifestation, arose, in part at least, out of his life as a member, assenting or dissenting, of and within that community; in an age when there is only a public, his self-development receives no such extraneous help, so that, unless he replaces it by taking over the task of directing his life by his own deliberate intention, his growth and hence his poetry is at the mercy of personal accidents, love-affairs, illnesses, bereavements, and so forth.
Again it was in the community that he formerly found a source of value outside himself, and unless he now can replace this vanished source by another, or at least search for it, his only standard for appreciating experience is The Interesting, which in practice means his childhood and his sex-life, so that he escapes being a journalist who fawns on the public only to become a journalist who fawns on his own ego; the selection and treatment of experience is still conditioned by its news value. In the case of much 'advanced' poetry, the public is therefore, though quite unjustifiably, quite right in repudiating it; not because, as the public thinks, it is too difficult, but because, once one has learned the idiom, it is too easy; one can translate it immediately and without loss of meaning into the language of the Daily Press. Far from being what it claims to be, and is rejected by the public for being,
The Shrieking heaven lifted over men
it is, what the public demands but finds elsewhere in much better brands,
The dumb earth wherein they set their graves
A volume of good poetry, like this collection of Miss Louise Bogan's, represents today therefore a double victory, over the Collective Self and over the Private Self. As her epigraph she uses a quotation from Rilke—
Wie ist das klein womit wir ringen,
was mit uns ringt, wie ist das gross
And the poems that follow are the fruit of such a belief, held and practised over years, that Self-development is a process of self-surrender, for it is the Self that demands the exclusive attention of all experiences, but offers none in return.
The playthings of the young
Get broken in the play,
Get broken, as they should.
In the early sections Miss Bogan employs her gift in the way in which, as a rule, it should at first be employed, to understand her weakness to which it is dialectically related, for wherever there is a gift, of whatever kind, there is also a guilty secret, a thorn in the flesh and the first successful poems of young poets are usually a catharsis of resentment.
Cry song, cry
And hear your crying lost
Poems at this stage are usually short, made up of magical lyric phrases which seems to rise involuntarily to the consciousness, and their composition is attended by great excitement, a feeling of being inspired.
Some excellent poets, like Houseman and Emily Dickinson, never get beyond this stage, because the more successful the catharsis, the more dread there must be of any change either in one's life or one's art, for a change in the former threatens the source of the latter which is one's only consolation, and the latter can only change by ceasing to console. Miss Bogan, however, recognised this temptation and resisted it.
My mouth, perhaps, may learn one thing too well,
My body hear no echo save its own,
Yet will the desperate mind, maddened and proud,
Seek out the storm, escape the bitter spell.
But the price and privilege of growth is that the temptation resisted is replaced by a worse one. No sooner does the mind seek to escape the bitter spell than the lying Tempter whispers—
The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life or of the work
The poet who escapes from the error of believing that the relation of his life to his work is a direct one, that the second is the mirror image of the first, now falls into the error of denying that there need be any relation at all, into believing that the poetry can develop autonomously, provided that the poet can find it a convenient Myth. For the Myth is a set of values and ideas which are impersonal and so break the one-one relationship of poetry to experience by providing other standards of importance than the personally interesting, while at the same time it is not a religion, that is to say, it does not have to be believed in real life, with all the effort and suffering which that implies.
Thus we find modern poets asking of a general idea, not Is It True?, but Is It Exciting? Is It Poetically Useful?, and whether they are attracted to Byzantium and The Phases of the Moon, like Yeats, or to the Id or Miss History like his younger and less-talented colleagues, the motive and its motions are the same.
But the escape from the Self without the surrender of the Self is, of course, an illusion, for it is the Self that still chooses the particular avenue of escape. Thus Yeats, the romantic rebel against the Darwinian Myth of his childhood with its belief in The Machine and Automatic Progress, adopts as poetic 'organisers' woozy doctrines like The Aristocratic Mask and The Cyclical Theory of Time while remaining personally, as Eliot rather slyly remarks, 'a very sane man'; others fashion an image out of the opposites of puritanical parents or upper class education. And still the personal note appears, only now in the form of its denial, in a certain phoney dramatisation, a 'camp' of impersonality. Further the adoption of a belief which one does not really hold as a means of integrating experience poetically, while it may produce fine poems, limits their meaning to the immediate context; it creates Occasional poems lacking any resonance beyond their frame. (Cf., for example Yeats' Second Coming with Eliot's East Coker).
To have developed to the point where this temptation is real, and then to resist it, is to realise that the relation of Life to Work is dialectical, a change in the one presupposes and demands a change in the other, and that belief and behaviour have a similar relation, that is to say, that beliefs are religious or nothing, and a religion cannot be got out of books or by a sudden vision, but can only be realised by living it. And to see this is to see that one's poetic development must be restrained from rushing ahead of oneself while at the same time one's self-development must not be allowed to fall behind.
Reading through Miss Bogan's book [Poems and New Poems], one realizes what is the price and the reward for such a discipline.
The hasty reader hardly notices any development; the subject matter and form show no spectacular change: he thinks—"Miss Bogan. O yes, a nice writer of lyrics, but all these women poets, you know, slight. Only one string to their bow." It is only by reading and rereading that one comes to appreciate the steady growth of wisdom and technical mastery, the persistent elimination of the consolations of stoicism and every other kind of poetic theatre, the achievement of an objectivity about personal experience which is sought by many but found only by the few who dare face the Furies.
In the last two sections, in poems like "Animal, Vegetable and Mineral" and "Evening in the Sanitarium" Miss Bogan turns to impersonal subjects, and here again the hasty will say: "too slight. I prefer her earlier work," because he cannot understand the integrity of an artist who will not rush her sensibility, knowing that no difficulty can be cheated without incurring punishment.
But the difficulty of being an artist in an age when one has to live everything for oneself, has its compensations. It is, for the strong, a joy to know that now there are no longer any places of refuge in which one can lie down in comfort, that one must go on or go under, live dangerously or not at all.
It is therefor impossible today to predict the future of any poet because the future is never the consequence of a single decision but is continually created by a process of choice in which temptation and opportunity are perpetually presented, ever fresh and ever unforseen. All one can say is that Miss Bogan is a poet in whom, because she is so clearly aware of this, one has complete faith as to her instinct for direction and her endurance, and that, anyway, what she has already written is of permanent value. Future generations will, of course, be as foolish as ours, but their follies like our own and those of every generation will mainly effect their judgment of their present which is always so much more 'interesting' than the silly old past.
Miss Bogan, I fancy, is then going to be paid the respect she deserves when many, including myself, I fear, of those who now have a certain news value, are going to catch it.
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